


the color of its countries

by madamebadger



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alien Culture, Background Tali'Zorah/Kal'Reegar, Canon-Typical Violence, Cultural Differences, Edible Body Paint, F/M, Family, Marking, Mass Effect Kink Meme, Not Mass Effect 3 Compliant, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-06
Updated: 2014-06-06
Packaged: 2018-02-03 16:16:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1750838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamebadger/pseuds/madamebadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neither of them expected some silly play with edible body paint to turn into something so serious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the color of its countries

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this... geez, must be three years ago now, for the Mass Effect Kink Meme, and finally decided to do some typo cleanup and post it. I haven't otherwise edited it, so it's not ME3-compliant (it was written about a year before ME3 came out), and it's also got a couple of canon goofs. (And I'd like to think I've improved as a writer in the intervening three years, so, you know.) But I do like it enough to finally put my name on it.
> 
> Set at some point after ME2 but before Arrival.

None of it would have happened, Shepard reflected, if she hadn’t chosen to take Tali and Kasumi with her to the Citadel this time.

Granted, there was always some entertainment value in bringing both Tali and Kasumi places at once; two curvy women with tight bodysuits attracted attention. She’d already seen two asari stop their conversation dead to watch them pass, and a human man had just about broken his neck trying to get a glimpse of their backsides. (Shepard herself got plenty of stares, but that was due partly to her status as a semi-famous figure and mostly to her armored bodysuit, which garnered a different kind of attention altogether.)

But the down side was, well….

“Ooooh, Shepard,” Kasumi said, clapping her hands together. Her expression was difficult to read due to the hood drawn down to her nose, but Shepard could see her mouth curling into a feline smirk. “You should stop _there_.” She pointed.

Shepard followed the line of her finger. “Sephylle’s Secrets,” read the curvy script over the door, and in the window were… oh. _Oh_.

“It’s an Asari place. They have the best shops, you know, _shops_. What with being interested in so many other species,” Kasumi was saying.

Tali’s face was even more obscured than Kasumi’s, but Shepard had never had any trouble reading _her_ , and what she was radiating now was embarrassment, written in the way she’d curved her shoulders inward and in the twining of her fingers.

Well… actually, _almost_ total embarrassment. Shepard could also see her glowing eyes darting curious glances at the shop.

“Kasumi,” Shepard said, rubbing her forehead. “We’re here to get—”

“—Upgraded inertial negators, and a new patch for the cyclonic barrier control system, I know.” Kasumi cocked her hip playfully to one side. “But you could also always get, you know, a _present_ for Garrus while you’re here.”

_That_ snapped Tali’s head back away from her contemplation of the shop’s display. “I didn’t hear that,” she said. “I definitely did not hear that.”

Kasumi was a bad, bad person. Her smile widened a tick. “Aw, Tali—”

“The Commander and Garrus are my friends, and there are certain—mental images I really do not need about my friends—”

Kasumi continued as though she hadn’t been interrupted. “—Don’t you want to get something for yourself, then? I’m sure they have quarian suit mods. Or maybe something for playing with that very cute marine type? What was his name? Kel?”

Tali spluttered. Shepard didn’t know whether quarians did anything even remote like blushing, and she wouldn’t have been able to see it through Tali’s smoky faceplate anyway, but Tali… well, Tali was a remarkably expressive young woman, all things considered. “His name is _Kal_ ,” she said, with an audible summoning of dignity. “Kal’Reegar.”

“Or maybe it’s not him. Maybe you’ve got a thing for someone on the crew?” Kasumi could move fast; without even visible motion, she had Tali’s wrist in her grip and was towing her toward the store. “Well, _I_ want to look around.”

Well, Shepard thought as she ambled along after: they were all adults. Adult women. When she was younger—actually, when she was about the same age Tali and Kasumi were now, odd thought that that was—she used to go to sex toy shops and lingerie stores with female friends. Mostly to laugh, granted. Kasumi—with her gossip and her brightly-colored mixed drinks and her badly-concealed crush on Jacob and her book collection—put Shepard forcefully in mind of a simpler time in her own life. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing, actually. (Maybe she should have thought earlier of dragging Tali up to Kasumi’s perch in the observation deck.)

And, well, the other thing was that Kasumi wasn’t _wrong_. Shepard wasn’t just an adult woman, she was an adult woman in a relationship, a very _satisfying_ relationship, and there was no harm and considerable good in having a little fun. A little fun, with Garrus. Um. Yes.

She ditched Tali and Kasumi, shooed away the solicitous asari proprietress, and browsed for a bit. She discarded most of the available options out of hand. Sexy outfits designed for humans emphasized areas of the body that did pretty much nothing for Garrus, who was far more interested in the bones at her wrists and ankles (and the back of her neck, and…) than in her jigglier bits. Not that he objected to the jiggly bits, but he wasn’t any more fond of them than, say, her ears.

Thinking of Garrus, especially in a place like this, inevitably sent her heart rate up a little, and made her daydream. How would he react if she pulled a flogger out of her bag? —Although she’d have to decide in advance who would be flogger and who flog-ee, since the toys designed for humans had little effect on thick turian plating, and the toys designed for turians would have taken the skin clean off Shepard’s ass, which was not a turn-on for either of them. Of course, she could always get one of each….

The thing that finally caught her eye, though, wasn’t elaborate or flashy, and it was its very simplicity that made her think, _Hm. That could be fun._

She made her purchase, slipped it into the discreet black bag (this really _was_ a classy place, asari-run and aimed primarily at a clientele of well-off asari), and went to find Tali and Kasumi. Belatedly, she hoped that Kasumi hadn’t caused Tali to rupture a blood vessel in embarrassment (did the Fleet even have shops like this, or were nerve stimulators a one-style-fits-all proposition?). But no, there were the pair of them, Tali gesturing to something on the shelf with a comment Shepard couldn’t quite make out and Kasumi nearly doubled over with laughter.

“What’d you buy?” Kasumi asked as they left.

“I _still don’t want to know,_ ” Tali said, in her ‘I have a shotgun’ tone of voice. Apparently she’d overcome her embarrassment enough to make fun of silicone replicas of krogan… equipment, but she still didn’t want to think about her friends getting it on. Well. Fair enough: there were plenty of people that Shepard thought of as good friends whose sex life she had less than no interest in. For instance, she hoped Captain Anderson had a very satisfying life after hours, and wanted to know absolutely nothing about it.

“I’m not telling,” she said, to Kasumi’s dismay and Tali’s relief. And she maintained that stance all the way back to the ship.

* * *

On the Normandy—after she made sure Ken and Gabby had received the ship upgrades she’d bargained so carefully over—she sent Garrus a discreet ping letting him know she was… _free_ this evening. Shucked off the armor and took a shower, put on a little something comfortable that showed off her throat and collarbones. And waited. Impatiently. Nothing like visiting a sex shop to get your mind going in one very particular direction….

Garrus didn’t bother to hit the chime on her door these days, which gave her an obscure kind of pleasure. He came straight in, and he was rubbing his face with one gloved hand, his voice tired as he said, “You would not _believe_ the day I’ve had.” Then he looked up, and trailed off as the door whisked shut behind him. “…Looks like you’ve had a pretty good day, though.”

“You could say that.”

"Negotiations went all right, I take it?" Garrus asked, settling on the bed next to her and hauling off his boots. He flexed his toes and exhaled with relief.

"Fine. Came in under budget." Oh, the thrilling conversations of her love life. When she'd been Tali's age, she would have never understood it, the sheer pleasure of being able to unload about mundanities.

"Let me guess: you told 'em it was your favorite shop in the Citadel." Garrus' touch (thumb ghosting briefly over the back of her wrist) belied his smirk. 

"Ha ha." Shepard felt her breath catch in her chest when he pulled off his gloves, careful and slow, revealing the glittering points of his talons. She trailed a hand up his back, glad he'd shed his hardsuit before coming up. To human touch, even a very relaxed turian felt tense, since heavy plates didn't give beneath the fingertips the way thin skin over muscles did. But she'd learned, gradually, how to tell tension in Garrus' body: the way his plates shifted slightly out of alignment when he was holding himself rigid with stress, the way the smaller scale-like patches of hide bunched up beneath his cowl and around the joints of his shoulders. She could feel them all slightly out of place, even through the fabric of his shirt. "What happened today?"

Garrus exhaled, and she felt a little of the tension drain out of him in the way the plates loosened along his spine. She worked her fingers up and down, slowly, finding the right places to put a little pressure. It was less like massage and more like using a lever, but hey…. "Nothing _bad_ , just… the cannons are doing something odd and I can't figure out why, I keep running the numbers and they don't come out right, and worse, they keep not coming out right in different ways. After the fifth different answer I started to wonder if I was losing my mind." She could feel the complementary vibrations of his doubled vocal cords through her fingertips.

"Ask Tali?" She let her hands run farther up his spine, over the cloth-covered edge of his bony cowl and along the bare, sensitive skin on its inside. It wasn't a major erogenous zone—wasn't really an erogenous zone at all, honestly—but she'd gradually learned enough about his reactions that she could manage more subtlety than going straight for his fringe or for the dip between his torso and hipbones. "She could probably take a look at what's going on under the hood." _And I refrained from traumatizing her with information about our sex life, so she'll almost certainly still be willing to talk to you about it,_ she thought but did not say.

"Mmh." She wasn't sure if that was agreement or just appreciation, but either way, he paused to take off his shirt, and then half-turned and hooked his hands around her waist. She was still surprised, every time, at the casual strength he had at his command; he hauled her into his lap without even a hard breath of effort. "Don't really want to talk about the battery computers anymore," he said. He'd dropped his head so that she could feel each word as a warm breath on her throat, and she shuddered all the way down from the nape of her neck to her tailbone.

"That's okay," she said. "Neither do I."

They didn't talk much for a while after that. She mapped the hide of his plates, like warm leather under her fingertips, and bit the tip of his keelbone just to feel the reverberations of his growl rising up out of his chest and into her hands. Garrus' tongue traced the curves of her ear with an agonizing slowness that left her squirming astride his thighs. He finished by catching her earlobe between the harder, beaklike plates of his mouth—something between a nip and a kiss—and then murmured in her ear, "What's the occasion?"

She squirmed more, dug her hands up under his fringe for a grip and was pleased when that made him purr-growl again and shift beneath her. "What d'you mean?"

"You're all dressed up." Another nip, to the sensitive skin just beneath the corner of her jaw, and then his tongue followed the vee-shaped tendons of her throat downward. "Or dressed down, or whatever."

"You don't seem to be objecting." She could feel his mandibles ghost outward in a smile, and then he started tracing a path from her sternum out along her left collarbone, just as slow and careful as if he was lining up a critical shot.

"No," he said, and again, breath and vibrations against the curve of her shoulderbone made her shudder. "Not objecting. Just," a bite, "curious."

"Actually, I—god, you're distracting."

"Why, thank you."

"—I did have a reason. I almost forgot." She wriggled backwards off his lap, and laughed when he made a protesting noise and grabbed for her. "I'll be right back."

She'd left the bag on the desk, which meant an endless trek all the way up the stairs. Shepard lobbed it to Garrus; he caught it on one claw, studied its very elegant and discreet logo, then gave her a brow-plates-raised knowing look. "I think we've found your _true_ favorite shop in the Citadel."

"Shut up," she said, but she was laughing as she pounced back into his lap, feeling suddenly playful and much younger. Kasumi was right: it had been a good idea. 

Garrus tugged the bag off his claw and pulled out her purchase. He turned the round tin over. "Body paint?"

Shepard took it from him and squirmed up closer so that her breasts were pressed against his chestplates and her lips brushed his mandibles as she said, " _Edible_ body paint, no less."

"Hmm," Garrus said, his body rumbling an interested counterpoint that she could feel through her hands and arms and breasts. He retrieved the tin again—Shepard had distracted herself by nibbling the downturned tips of his mandibles—and popped the top off. Inside, the paint was subdivided into eight colors, red through purple plus black and white. She'd gone all-out for the deluxe version. "Edible for which one of us?"

"Both, actually." That was the other deluxe element: it had been purified so that no trace of protein remained. A painstaking and not-inexpensive process, that.

"Hmm," Garrus said again, and this time the rumble extended into a purr. Most human languages didn't have enough words to cover the magnificent variety of turian vocalizations; 'growl' and 'rumble' and 'purr' didn't quite get across the subtleties of expression his polyphonic vocal apparatus was capable of, and Shepard was only just beginning to be able to distinguish them anyway. This particular vibration expressed both intrigued curiosity and arousal, though, and that was exactly what she had been hoping for.

She dipped her fingertips into the orange, the closest she could come to the rusty color of the Normandy's highlight paint job, and swept it along the underside of one mandible, just beneath the blue of his facial markings. She moved to dip her fingers back in the orange and repeat on the other side, but Garrus was faster: he dipped a forefinger in the green (the same shade as her armor, nearly) and swept it along her collarbones.

"You and clavicles," Shepard said, with a laugh that turned to a gasp as Garrus bent his head and licked the green back off.

"You don't seem to be protesting." Another sweep of green, curling in from the ball of her shoulder joint inward, this one curving all the way down her breastbone. When he followed the track of his fingers with his tongue, ending with the forked tip swirling over her heart, she couldn't help it: she jerked her hips against his.

She couldn't even fault him for his smug chuckle.

"How's it taste?" she asked, pushing him backward onto the bed. Turian males couldn't lie down on their backs for long—the heavy arch of their cowl made it uncomfortable at best—but it would work for a little while. She shimmied up further until her thighs bracketed his waist, encouraged by his hands curling around the backs of her thighs. Garrus was probably getting green paint on her ass. She really didn't care.

Garrus made a show of licking the plates around his mouth. His tongue was faintly green. "Sweet," he said. "Just sweet."

"Makes sense." To be safe for both levo and dextro species, it had probably been purged of everything but carbohydrates: simple starches and sugars had no chirality, ergo were safe. Hands on the plates covering Garrus' powerful chest muscles (and leaving orange smudges in her wake), Shepard leaned down and carefully, thoroughly, _slowly_ licked his mandible clean of paint. Sweet, yes, and under that the now-familiar taste of his skin, metal and leather; the slick smoothness of his hide-plate there, and, when she curled her tongue underneath (which made Garrus groan and buck his hips against her) the sensitive softness of the mandible's inner side.

He wrenched himself up with a sudden movement that toppled her onto the bed, one thigh still hooked over the top of his hip. He caught the tin of paint with a motion so sudden it reminded her of a striking snake, then dipped his fingers back in the green. Side by side and face to face now, he painted a line down her sternum again, then caught the edge of her negligee (getting green all over it, and she really could not have cared less) and tugged it up over her head. Where it ended up, she didn't know, or care. With the soft pads of his fingers, and careful of her thinner skin, he painted more green on the tight points of her nipples and then dropped his head to lick her clean again.

(Her breasts in and of themselves did very little for him, and yet somehow that made it more intimate, the fact that he spent so much time winding his tongue around them just because it made _her_ feel good.)

She scrabbled, with a little help, to get his pants off. By the time she did, the plates protecting his groin had already shifted and he'd fully unsheathed, hard and flushed deeply blue, and she went to draw a spiral of contrasting orange up his shaft… and was stopped by his hand on her wrist.

"If you do that," he said, "it's going to be all over really fast." His voice sounded thinner and tighter than usual; one of his twin larynxes was now totally occupied with a constant aroused rumbling that she could feel all through his body and her own.

"That's okay with me," she said, and felt him shudder all over, heard his purr briefly harmonize with itself before he got control of himself again.

"Yeah, but I want—" he said, and then stopped trying to talk at all and instead tracked his hand downward and slipped a finger into her.

(He had to be so careful, his sharp claw naked within the sensitive folds of her body, but she trusted him to be careful and he _was_ , and that combination of potential danger and total faith in him was more a turn-on than nearly anything else they did.)

"Yeah," she said, her own voice tight and breathless, reaching blindly to the bedside table for their stock of turian-style dual-chirality condoms. "Yeah."

Even the first time, when they'd been fumbling to figure everything out, by the time they got to _this_ part things had just… worked. She hooked her legs up over the spurs of his hips, opening herself to him and at the same time rubbing the sensitive skin at his waist with her knee. He thrust into her, thrust and swelled, caught her ass in his hands and pulled her against him. He sank in hard and deep and so simply _good_ it drove a sound from her throat. And the answering two-tone vibration in his chest buzzed through her, made her arch, made her gasp. She dug her fingers into his fringe and tugged, just to ground herself, and he kicked up the pace a notch, and….

She'd never been much of a screamer, but she groaned as she tightened around him, head thrown back and feeling his mandibles against her throat as he bit—gently—at the skin there, leaving marks but not drawing blood. Her body jerked, electrified by his touch, by the roughness of his body against hers, by the warmth of his breath on her throat. And even as she panted in aftermath she could feel his purr broken up by the bellows of his gasping breaths. He ran his hand down her arm to catch her wrist, rubbing his thumb against the sensitive inside and setting off a tremor of aftershocks that drew him to the brink and over.

She gasped at the headboard and felt him panting against her shoulder, felt his hot breath, exquisite on skin sensitized by the tips of his fangs. She could feel the tension melting out of both of them. "Ooh," she said, the only thing her brain and mouth could manage at that moment.

"Yeah," Garrus said, laughing through fast breaths. He rubbed his forehead against her temple and sighed.

"Feel better?"

Another laugh. "No offense, Shepard, but that's a _really_ stupid question."

Her fingertips could feel the truth of his words: his body relaxed, the plates of his chest and back easing. 

After a moment, when her heartrate and breathing had returned to normal, she capped the tin and put it aside. _Experiment successful_ , she thought, and also, _Thank you, Kasumi_.

"The paint was a good idea," Garrus said, echoing her thought. His hand made a lazy path down her spine, then back up.

"Yeah," she said, and then, "Thank you." After a moment, she rolled over and nudged her forehead beneath his chin, against the surprisingly soft skin of his throat. "I thought you'd like it, given all your markings."

Garrus went still all over, and for a moment she was afraid she'd said something wrong. But then he said, simply, "Yeah, that's true." 

She rubbed the skin between the plates of his shoulders and wondered what that was about. Well. There would be time to find out. They'd only barely used any of the paint, after all.

* * *

The truth was, after the Collector base, doing merc cleanup was no challenge. Worthwhile, especially to help out an old friend, but just not a challenge.

"Sniper, three o'clock—" Shepard began, and then the sniper's head exploded in a haze of red. 

"Have I mentioned that I love this rifle?" Garrus' voice rumbled across the comm, sounding smug.

"Only about thirty-seven times per mission, every mission we've been on," Tali said without breaking stride as she worked her way north behind cover. Despite her mock-aggrieved tone, Shepard could hear the smile in her voice.

"Krogan—" Garrus began, and before he could even finish the sentence Shepard had summoned and slung a bolt of biotic energy. The krogan went down with a thundering of heavy armor. Without missing a beat, Garrus continued, "—Aw, is my witty repartee getting stale, Tali? I'll have to come up with new lines."

"That's quite all right. Your old lines are bad enough, I hesitate to—" a brief pause as she got off an energy-draining bolt, bringing two mechs down in a blaze of eyesearing white "—encourage you to come up with _more_."

Shepard finish winding up another ball of energy in her gut and slung it out along her fingertips (not an accurate physiological description, admittedly, but it was how it _felt_ to use biotics), watching with satisfaction as three mercs went down. "I need to find more interesting jobs for you two, clearly, or you'll just keep cluttering up my comm trying to keep yourselves entertained."

"By all means, yes, Shepard," Garrus said. "Another Collector ship. Wouldn't want us getting bored."

"Personally, I rather like the idea of boredom," Tali said. The sound of gunfire had died away, and she eased up out of cover; a good sign that the others could too, because if Tali's custom-tinkered scanners weren't picking anything up, that meant there wasn't anything to pick up. "I don't remember what it's like at all anymore."

"I guarantee, three days of paperwork? You'd change your mind," Garrus said.

"Probably," Tali agreed, amicable. "Shepard, next move?"

"If this section's clear, we're done here. We'll head back to base and tell—" She paused. Something had changed in Garrus' posture, subtle but enough for her to read the message: something not quite right. Tali went quite still too; for all their banter, she probably trusted Garrus' instincts as well as Shepard did herself. "Garrus, what's up?"

"I hear…." Garrus began, and then turned his head—turned his head so that his unscarred side was cocked forward, listening with his own natural auditory membrane. Shepard knew from Chakwas' reports that the artificial auditory membrane on the damaged side was at least as good, possibly better, but Garrus never seemed to quite trust it.

Garrus stalked, and for a brief moment Shepard could see why people compared his species to terrestrial birds, could see something of the stalking crane, the poised falcon, and something, too, of the long-extinct utahraptor. The impression wasn't contradicted at _all_ by his sudden sideways leap, pinning—

"Got a wounded one here, Commander," he said, and she knew the use of her title was meaningful. As a C-Sec investigator, frustrated by his restrictions, he might've roughed up the mercenary. As Archangel, breathing ash and rage, he would've shot to kill, injured or no. But as her crewmate, he held back and, indeed, stepped back, gun still trained on the injured Blue Sun.

The mercenary was a turian, lean for his kind and clearly crippled by the battle—the armor on his legs blown to pieces, his flesh beneath badly burned—but probably not fatally, if he got himself some kind of semi-competent medical care afterward. He was conscious, too, but not speaking. Amber eyes glinted out of deep eye sockets, but he wasn't looking at her. He was looking at Garrus, who was looking back… through the scope of his rifle.

"It's your lucky day," Shepard said. "Unless they give me a really good reason, I don't shoot enemies who surrender."

The merc didn't answer her. His glinting eyes, sunken deep beneath his red-marked plates, didn't leave Garrus' face. "Vakarian," he said.

Garrus' posture didn't change a bit, he was too disciplined for that. Still, Shepard knew his reactions well enough to know that—hidden by his suit—the spines were rising on his arms and legs.

"You're not talking to Vakarian, you're talking to me," Shepard snapped.

The turian hissed in a way she hadn't ever actually heard before, though she knew intellectually that turians were capable of it. It sounded more like an angry cat than a snake. "No honor in talking to—" and then the translator failed on a word it couldn't readily gloss, but that sounded plenty nasty. At the same time, Garrus rose up further, onto the balls of his feet, and jammed his rifle's muzzle into the merc's thorax.

"'Vakarian' isn't talking to you," he said, the flanging in his voice deepening. Threat inflection. "So you'll talk to Shepard."

The turian spat. His eyes never left Garrus, but finally he said, "All right, _Shepard_. You can carry this message back to your cronies in Cerberus."

He shouldn't have been able to move so fast, for someone with two charred legs. As it was, he actually managed to sit up, and Shepard got a brief flash of a combat knife, before she heard the shattering report of Garrus' rifle and the turian fell back again, this time not to rise.

Shepard exhaled. This sort of thing always left a nasty taste in her mouth, far more so than straightforward combat. "I hate it when they do that. I'm not even _with_ Cerberus now."

"Suicide by enemy combatant," Garrus said. His voice sounded thick.

"Let's get out of here," Shepard said, and both Garrus and Tali nodded.

* * *

One _major_ advantage of being with Garrus: the aftermath of battles.

Before their relationship, after any battle that didn't send her to the infirmary, she was generally bone-weary and yet too wound up to sleep. She'd lost count of the number of evenings she'd spent working off excess adrenaline by pacing the room until simple exhaustion overrode restlessness and allowed her to sleep. It was a wonder she hadn't worn a visible path around her bed, past the fishtank, up the stairs, around her small office, and back down.

Now, she still had the excess energy, but there were considerably better ways to work it off.

Her armor and his, not quite scattered across the floor because they both respected it too much, but not quite put tidily away, either. Her clothes and his, _definitely_ scattered recklessly across the floor. Her back against the fishtank, his hands curling under her thighs (gloves still on so he didn't have to worry about being carefulwith his talons), her legs hooked high around his waist and driving him crazy as she rubbed her inner thigh against the sensitive skin there….

He thrust hard and she braced her shoulders against the cool glass to give back as good as she got, locking her ankles across the small of his back for better leverage. At this angle he hit deep inside, his legs braced to arch powerfully into her; her hands scraped at his cowl just to keep a grip and she tipped her head back and gasped a sob at the ceiling and at the stars through the skylight. Was glad, not for the first time, that the Loft was separate from the rest of the ship, so that there was no chance of anyone hearing.

Garrus was no quieter, the constant deep rumble in his chest vibrating through him—all through him, even deep inside her—and the doubled moan in her ear when he bent his head to nip at her shoulder set her quivering, tight around him and seeking her orgasm with tensed muscles. Reaching, reaching, higher, further— _there—_

She shuddered and curled her fingers hard enough to leave nailmarks on the skin of his cowl, shuddered hard and couldn't stop the gasped _Ah!_ that left her mouth, any more than she could stop the way her muscles relaxed into heaviness afterward. Heavy and deep and quiet as the water behind the glass at her back, and she sighed and shivered as Garrus followed her minutes later.

* * *

They made it back to the bed, somehow, and for a moment Shepard just lay on the coverlet next to him and stared at the blue-streaked starfield through the window above them, grinning like an idiot. _Oh, endorphins, how I love you._ She reached out a hand and Garrus found it with his, and in a gesture that was rapidly becoming second nature she folded her fingers together (pinkie against ring finger, middle against index finger, thumb alone) so she could twine them more easily with his. After a moment, with a not-at-all-serious-sounding grumble about having to do everything, Garrus rolled over and crawled up the bed, shucked off his gloves, and pulled back the coverlet. Shepard squirmed up after him.

Under the crisp sheets, she curled against his body, relishing the warmth—his body naturally ran a few degrees hotter than she did, not enough to be uncomfortable but enough to be noticeable. Between that and the leathery smoothness of his plates, he was like a heating pad against her sore muscles. Comforting. 

Yeah, this was much better than her prior pace-in-circles-like-a-trapped-rat battle-aftermath.

Garrus exhaled and tucked his face against her shoulder, and she rubbed his shoulder, the bony edge of his collar, the soft skin of his throat. She could feel his voice as he said, "That beats the hell out of taking my frustrations out on an innocent punching bag."

"Ha. I was just thinking pretty much the same thing."

Garrus rumbled amusement. "Although, next time, I vote we refuel somewhere that someone will give us a fill-up _without_ asking us to take out a merc company?"

"Request noted," Shepard said. His hand smoothed over the bare curve of her waist and hip, thumb drawing slow circles on the jut of her hipbone. She was silent for a long moment, relishing the warmth, the touch of his skin, washing away the tension. After a quiet while, she said, "Wasn't expecting to run into someone you knew."

"Hm?" Garrus raised his head a little and looked at her, clearly puzzled.

"The turian. Who was he?"

"I haven't the faintest idea."

"But—" Shepard said, briefly floundering. Then: "Well, he knew you, anyway."

"What makes you say that?"

"He knew your name," Shepard said, finally exasperated.

"Oh," Garrus said, and chuckled, a sound that vibrated through his chest. "Oh, that doesn't mean anything. He might've just recognized…" and he brought his fingers up to gesture at his facial markings.

"Oh." Shepard wrinkled her nose. "How likely is that? You learn all of them?"

"Not hardly. There must be thousands. But you remember the markings for people you know, so if he knew _a_ Vakarian…"

"…He'd recognize the marks."

"Right. Or, well, if you know how, you can read them, kind of. There's a pattern to the way they're designed. So even if he couldn't tell 'Vakarian' exactly, he could read them and tell that I was from Palaven, from a well-respected clan and family, and make an educated guess."

"Oh," Shepard said, digesting this. "So what could you tell from his?"

Garrus rolled his eyes in thought, staring at the ceiling. After a moment, he said, "…He must've been from Terakel colony… I'm really out of practice with this." Another pause. "Reasonably well-respected clan, nothing noteworthy. That's all I could tell. And that could apply to dozens of clans, hundreds of families—"

"—Thousands of individuals?"

"Tens or hundreds of thousands, actually." A pause. "It's far from an exact science. Just patterns."

Shepard let her fingers trail up Garrus' neck—he sighed, contented and pleased both, and closed his eyes—and then rubbed them over the plates on the undamaged side of his face, remembering how she'd drawn Normandy rust-orange along his mandible, beneath the blue of his homeworld and clan markings. She could feel the marks, beneath her fingertips, as a slight textural contrast. The skin over the markings was just a little bit rougher than the almost-slick surface of his face plates. "How do you—what's it like to get them?"

Garrus opened one eye. "Why the sudden curiosity?"

"Call it… interspecies education."

Garrus' mandibles flared beneath her fingertips in amusement, but he said, "All right, if it makes you happy. It goes like this: when you're a teenager, when you finally get declared truly adult in the eyes of the clan, they put the marks on. For me, it was a couple of years before I first entered the service."

"I'm guessing the marks aren't a tattoo the way I would mean a tattoo," Shepard ventured. Turian plates were only like human skin in a generally analogous way, after all.

"Needles?" Garrus shook his head. "No. It's much simpler than that. They strip off the—our plates have a waterproof layer on top of the skin, called the cuticle—they strip that off with an acid, and then use a dye on the hide beneath. The cuticle gradually grows back over it, so the marks are permanent, underneath. The cuticle's never quite the same, though. That's why you can feel the marks, not just see them."

"Acid?" Shepard flattened her fingers over the thick, curved line just beneath Garrus' eye. "Isn't that—well, painful? Dangerous?"

He gripped her earlobe between thumb and forefinger and wiggled it meaningfully. "Your species decorates itself by punching holes in loose bits of skin and hanging things from them, I don't think you have much ground to talk."

Shepard hesitated, then laughed. "Fair enough. So once the cuticle regrows, the marks are permanent?"

Garrus shrugged. "Mostly. You can have the cuticle stripped again and the hide bleached—and you can put other marks on the hide once that's done, if you've petitioned to join another clan. Or you can just have them stripped and go barefaced. And the markings wear off over time, with the molt, so most people have them redone every five or ten years." He gave a sideways smile. "If you're particularly vain, you might get them touched up every year or so, so the colors don't fade and the edges stay sharp. Touching them up isn't as intense as getting them fully redone, though."

"And are you," Shepard asked playfully, rising up on one elbow to trace the deeply blue lines on his face, "particularly vain?"

"I used to be." Garrus didn't quite rise to the bait; his response was less playful, more serious. His mandibles drew back in, not so much at ease anymore.

Before he'd had half his face blown off, he meant—and Shepard knew he meant—and cursed her own thoughtlessness for bringing it up. She'd never asked (it seemed weird, somehow, to ask him about his habits at picking up women before her) but she knew anecdotally that he'd been quite handsome by turian standards. Between that and the status designated by his colony-clan-family markings, he'd probably done pretty well with turian women. And she knew that, though he never talked about it and rarely even alluded to it, he was dismayed by the still-serious scarring on his face. _Some women find facial scars attractive. Mind you, most of those women are krogan._

She wasn't sure what to say. Pointing out that he was attractive to _her_ would be too… too obvious that she could read his insecurities, and anyway, beside the point. He was attractive to her because she cared for him. She knew he appreciated that, but it didn't have anything to do with how other people would view him, or his scarred face.

She drew her fingertips down his mandible, thinking of the way she'd drawn Normandy orange alongside the blue. The way he'd painted green on her body, the color of her armor. The silence drew out between them, and every second that passed tightened like a knot in her gut. Finally she said, "Every mark on you means something to me, Garrus, not just the deliberate ones."

He looked at her for a long time, searching—for what? She didn't know—and then his eyes softened, the armored brow ridges relaxing and rising. 

"We should get some sleep," he said, his voice purring low and drawing the tension from her despite herself.

"Yeah," she said, and kissed him on the tip of his right mandible, and then pressed her forehead to his. He returned the gesture, sighed, and closed his eyes.

She lay awake, looking at him, for a while before sleep finally came.

* * *

That she woke alone wasn't necessarily a bad sign. Turians didn't sleep in single long block of time the way humans did, but made up the difference with catnaps (hawknaps? turian-naps?) throughout the day. Shepard's habitual six hours a night was fairly spartan by human standards, but unusually long by turian: most nights Garrus slept three or four hours, then dozed for half an hour here and there, on his feet (literally—well, in a crouch, anyway) in the gunnery. On particularly decadent mornings, when neither of them had anything really pressing going on, he'd hang around her quarters until she started to stir and then crawl back into bed as she woke… but they didn't have the leisure for particularly decadent mornings much.

Still, she was sorry to wake and find his side of the bed empty but for rumpled sheets. She pushed that aside, along with the brief pang of worry about that unreadable expression on his face the night before, and began her morning routine.

Even apart from little things like killing Collectors—and mercenaries—and the occasional varren, Shepard thought she probably got a normal person's worth of exercise just making her daily rounds of the ship. Back when she'd been Alliance, her superiors had always thought she wasted a lot of time checking in on her team… and then, invariably, those same superiors would ask in wonderment how she managed to have such a loyal, cohesive group whose abilities she knew inside-out. _Ask a stupid question…._

She started at the bottom and worked her way up, literally. Jack's tendency to swear at her was nearly as bracing as morning coffee, and she'd learned quickly that she could improve things significantly by combining the two: bring Jack a mug (black, two sugars) first thing in the morning, and it put her in a considerably better mood for the rest of the day. Possibly because she worked off her aggression by swearing creatively at the quality (or lack thereof) of Gardner's brew. After checking on Grunt and Zaeed, she stopped off in main engineering, one of her favorite places of the day.

"Power drain finallystabilized on the upgrade to the forward array," Gabby was saying, very professionally, and then rather less so: "What'd you do, Ken, put the distributer matrix in _backward_?"

"You are an evil, cruel woman," Kenneth said, and then implored the ceiling, "Sweet merciful fates preserve me from evil, cruel women."

"On this ship?" Gabby said, and then cackled. "You're doomed."

"I'm not sure that's fair," Shepard said, coming up behind then and pausing with her hip resting against the control panel. "Tali happens to be a very nice person."

"Glad to see I have you so thoroughly fooled," Tali said, and once again Shepard could hear her smile. "What can we do for you?"

"Just wanted to see how things were going, and if you had everything you needed," Shepard said.

Kenneth's eyes lit up. "I have just a little list, Commander—" he began, and then Gabby elbowed him in the side.

"The new forward array is drawing a lot of power," Gabby said, "not more than the girl can handle"—by which, Shepard knew, she meant the Normandy—"but more than the standard load balancer can manage well. We could use an upgraded modulator."

"Send me the specs, and I'll see what I can do." Shepard turned to Tali. "Anything else?" Tali shook her head, so Shepard continued, "Kasumi hasn't traumatized you too much?"

An elaborate sigh. "She asks me about Kal'Reegar every time she sees me," she said, but with the air, Shepard noticed, of someone who was secretly rather pleased.

"Kal'Reegar?" Gabby said, and then inhaled sharply. The sound of someone repressing a squeak. "Do you have a boyfriend, Tali?" And then, as though realizing she had maybe overstepped, she ended with a rather belated and weak, "—Ma'am?"

"He's not my boyfriend," Tali said, and oh, Shepard knew that tone well: the 'I don't want you to ask me except actually I really do' tone.

From her response, Gabby could read that tone just as well. "So that's the problem, then," she said, and dimpled. Shepard was going to have to mention her to Kasumi; they'd get along _just fine_.

"No girl talk in Engineering!" Kenneth implored the ceiling once again.

"Oh, stuff it, Ken, you're outnumbered," Gabby said, and then, to Tali, "So, what's he like?"

Shepard left them to it.

"We're doing well up here," Joker said when she arrived on the CIC level, "except for the part where Reapers are going to chew our faces off any moment now."

"Making sure that doesn't happen is my top priority, Jeff," EDI said soothingly.

"Aw, hear that, Commander?" Joker tugged his hat down almost over his eyes and grinned. "She's going to make sure we don't all die horribly!"

"My human minions are no use to me dead," EDI said in the same serene tone. Then: "That was also a joke."

"She tries so hard, it's cute," Joker said conspiratorially to Shepard, and then, to EDI: "Keep trying, you'll get it eventually."

"I assure you my jokes are funny," EDI said, as wounded as a perfectly level-voiced AI could sound. "You just do not fully appreciate them."

"Who told you that? Legion?"

Shepard laughed. "Sounds like you two have things under control," she said.

By then it was early afternoon, time for a planning meeting with Miranda and Jacob, and then a risk analysis meeting with Mordin and EDI, and then some very important 'pacing and thinking' time, and by that point it was evening and she went down to the mess to join the crew for dinner.

"—rushed a Byerkus hive," Grunt was saying very proudly, waving his fork for emphasis. (Wrex had eaten with just a combat knife (quite tidily, too), but apparently the tank hadn't instructed Grunt on krogan table manners, and he'd learned by imitating the crew. More or less. Most of the crew didn't go after their food as if they had a grudge against it.) "The carnage was tremendous."

Shepard wondered briefly when exactly Grunt had had a chance to rush anything, and then what a Byerkus was, and only then realized they were discussing a _game_.

"Didn't it blow up on you?" That was Garrus. "Byerkus hives always blow up."

"It did," Grunt said. "And I had to go back to the spawn point. But it was _glorious_." He stopped waving the fork and used it to savage an innocent piece of… well, okay, it was vat-protein steak, it probably had it coming.

"It goes better if you sneak up the back way," Garrus said. He hadn't seen her yet. He sounded quite cheerful, though, which made Shepard relax a little. "You can backstab your way all the way up the hive without setting off the explosion trigger."

"Or you can put flaming tar on the back of a blackroach," Tali said, "and let it bring the whole tower down when you're safely away. Fwhoosh," she added, for emphasis.

"What are we talking about?" Shepard asked, setting her plate of mysterious meat down at the table and sitting between Tali and Grunt. Garrus was poking at something from a dextro-food packet (it honestly didn't look any worse than the vat protein dish the levo-eating crew had). How and when Tali ate, Shepard didn't know, but she came down to the mess for company at mealtimes anyway.

"Nothing," Garrus said.

" _Galaxy of Fantasy_ ," Grunt said. "Tali'Zorah suggested it. I can kill hundreds of enemies a day!" He savaged his vat protein a bit more. "It's not satisfying like real enemies, but it's good for when we're between battles. Or when you don't take me on the squad."

Shepard decided not to rise to that particular bait. "I didn't know you played," she said to Tali and Garrus.

"It's a good way to unwind," Tali said.

"I used to," Garrus added, quickly.

Down the table—how had Shepard not noticed her come in? Wait, dumb question—Kasumi said, "You don't have to be embarrassed. Shep unwinds by reading really terrible thrillers. Sometimes when she's making that 'I'm listening really intently to what you have to say' face at some long-winded idiot on a mission, she's really queued up the next chapter on her HUD."

"Kasumi," Shepard said. "Please tell me you haven't been hacking into my omnitool."

Kasumi's mouth curved into a smug little smile. "Can't blame a cat for being a cat, can't blame a thief and hacker for—"

"I can certainly blame you for being _unnecessarily_ _nosy_."

" _Anyway_ ," Grunt said. "It's amazing. You should try it, Shepard. A battlemaster like you could rule the server."

"The salesman on the Citadel keeps trying to sell me on it too," Shepard said, amused. "Maybe I will."

Grunt huffed. "Don't waste your credits. Tali'Zorah can set you up with a cracked copy."

Tali curled a little in embarrassment. _Oops_ , Shepard thought, _outed by the krogan!_ Aloud, she said, teasing, "Tali, I didn't know we had a pirate on board."

"It's not like that," Tali said. "I always send them the cost of a new copy of the game anonymously. I just object to the copy protection. Besides," and now she pointed an accusatory figure, although at whom Shepard had no idea, "those policies are prejudiced against quarians."

Garrus blinked at her. "You want to explain that?" 

Tali waved her finger, having shifted from embarrassed mode to irritated quarian mode. "Their hardware identifier hashes can't handle reconfigured mainframes, so half the time if someone on the flotilla buys a copy, it won't work anyway. And their support is awful. And if we try to—"

"Calm down," Shepard said, laughing. "I don't actually care what you do with your software."

Down the table, Jack looked up from her own dish of something in something sauce. (One of the biggest changes in the crew: after the Omega 4 Relay mission, Jack had started joining them for dinner. Just one or two nights a week, but still, that was a truly meaningful change.) "Hey, does that mean you can hook me up with a cracked version of the Hephaeston Anonymizer?"

"Talk to me after dinner," Tali murmured.

Shepard left them to the discussion, but slowed when she heard familiar footsteps behind her in the hall. Garrus caught up with her in time to ducked into the elevator with her. During its interminable crawl he said, "Hey. Sorry, uh—if I got weird. Last night."

"It's okay," she said. "I understand." And then, hesitantly, she raised her hand to stroke along the scarred side of his face. Pitted and pocked, rough to the touch, unlike the smooth hard feel of the plates on his undamaged side, but still—well. Still totally him, and therefore, attractive to her.

He smiled, and she felt his mandibles loosen a little under her touch. "Thanks," he said. Then, "I've got some stuff to do still—"

"Calibrations?" she interrupted, sweetly.

He made a face at her, and then laughed. "Yeah. But, ah… I'll see you tonight?"

"Definitely," she said. "We'll blow off some steam."

His eyes crinkled in amused appreciation.

* * *

Two more meetings, a lot more pacing, and finally Shepard was ready to call it a night. She was standing next to the couch, trying to work out the eternal kink in her shoulder, when she heard the door whoosh open and shut behind her. She didn't bother looking, and after a moment, she felt a familiar strong hand on her shoulder. Garrus' thumb worked into her trapezius, a slow powerful touch without even a hint of talon that drew off the soreness. Shepard sighed, and was startled to hear an edge of a moan in her own voice.

"You can just… keep doing that basically forever," she said, and felt-heard his low chuckle.

"I aim to please," he purred, and she turned to return the favor. He tended to tighten up in the chest, hunched over a workstation designed for someone a little shorter than he was. She walked him backward a few steps so they could sit on the bed, unhooked his shirt, and worked her fingers into the gaps between his too-tight plates. After a moment he sighed, and she could feel his breaths deepen, the tension unlocking in his chest. She scraped her fingernails playfully across the top of one of his chest plates and felt him purr.

"You know," she said, "I didn't used to think turians had any feeling in the plates."

"Mmm," Garrus said, eyes closed and looking very happy just then. "Well, it's not—exoskeleton or armor or anything, it's just skin with radiation-proof coating in the…." His head tipped back as she kept scratching. "Ahhh, why am I talking about radiation right now?"

"Damned if I know." Shepard smoothed her hands out over his skin. In the right light, the metallic element in his plating shone silver. "Looks like armor, though." Feeling suddenly playful, wanting something to contrast with the intensity of the night before, she went for the body paint.

"Hmm?" Garrus said, but didn't protest as she uncapped the little pot of white. With careful strokes, she wrote "N7" on his chest above where the heart would be on a human, and then again, to his bemused look, on his shoulder. A sweep of red here and there finished the look.

"See?" she said. "Armor."

He caught her fingers and—ooh—licked them clean, then examined the writing. "I think that constitutes a promotion, Commander."

"For extraordinary services rendered," she said, and grinned up at him, then leaned in to lick the writing back off. "Just hope nobody asks what services."

"I'll just say someone appreciated my precision, and… mmm… _firepower._ "

"That's terrible."

His eyes crinkled again. "You started it." Then he slid down to kneel-crouch in front of her, between her knees so they were face to face. "That gives me an idea."

She shivered. "Oh?"

"Yeah." Garrus reached for the paints himself. "Close your eyes,” he said, dipping one taloned finger in the pot of blue.

Shepard gave him a skeptical look. “You’re not going to write ‘idiot’ on my forehead or something, are you?”

His mandibles widened a little in amusement before he clamped them back down with a faint quiver, an expression of offended innocence that she _knew_ was an act. “Would I do something like that?”

“You most certainly would.”

Another brief flaring grin, and then, hand on his chest, said, “I promise not to write ‘idiot’ on your forehead. Or anything else insulting.” The hand-over-heart gesture was totally human (turian hearts were both lower and farther to the right on the body, and they didn't swear oaths by their organs in any case), but all the more touching because he'd got it from her.

"All right," she said, and closed her eyes.

A sweep of cool paint beneath her right eye, curving a little to follow the dip of her orbital bone and then drawing in across her cheek and the bridge of her nose to repeat on the other side. A dot-and-line sweep down her nose, crossing the first line. Another line, drawn briefly straight down from the inner dip of her ear and then sharply sideways across her cheek in a ticklish sweep that made her want to giggle. She stifled that impulse, though he growled playfully when the gesture made her compress her lips. "Don't move, you'll make me smear the paint." There was some brief—was it detail work?—done very carefully with the tip of a talon, here and there along her cheek and jaw, and suddenly Shepard knew exactly what Garrus was drawing.

And knowing it made her heart thump and her stomach tighten.

Garrus, though, Garrus just kept on, repeating on the other side, with silent and breathtaking care, repeating each sweep, each dot and line, carefully drawing the smooth upper curve of his talon to clear away excess paint where he made a mistake. Unbidden, she opened her eyes so she could see him. 

His eyes were very sharp, very focused on his work, the same focused expression she'd seen when he was sighting with a sniper rifle.

Then he drew back, fingers thoroughly smudged with blue, and his expression… changed, both the focus and the playful edge draining away. There was something—something—god, even with all this practice it was hard to read his expressions, totally alien as they were. His mandibles pulled in tightly but his jaw dropped behind them so that she could see the edges of his array of fangs; the ridges around his eyes softened and widened. Something like awe but also something like—consternation?—and yet not really either. He reached for her cheek, then hesitated.

It felt as though someone had suddenly sucked all the air out of the room.

"I, uh," Garrus said, his voice rough, and then he cleared his throat and looked at his fingers, blue-streaked. "I'd better wash my hands."

She would have offered to lick them clean, normally, but there was something in the way he asked that made Shepard think that he actually wanted a minute alone, so she nodded. The gesture made the still air move around her face, cool on the paint so she could feel very vividly the lines he'd drawn. Marks. Colony-clan-family, identity markings.

He rose, and she thought he didn't look as graceful as usual, seemed almost… shaky on his feet. She heard the sound of water running in the bathroom, and then it stopped, but he didn't emerge. She squirmed on the bed, restless—the marks drying on her face, tight and impossible to ignore—and counted to a hundred, then counted to a hundred again, then stared up at the stars above and her own wavering reflection in the glass. It was vague and wobbly, but she could see, yes, what he'd drawn were broad blue lines beneath her eyes, along her jaw, and she didn't need to be able to see details to know what they were.

After a few minutes more, unable to wait any longer and with her stomach in knots, she got to her feet and padded toward the bathroom. He'd left the door open, and she knocked on the doorframe and stuck her head in, forcing lightness into her voice when she asked, "What, did you get lost?"

Garrus' hands were clean, and clenched on either side of the sink. He was studying his own reflection in the mirror, his own markings no longer symmetrical thanks to the damage on his left side but still clearly exactly what they were. He was staring at his own reflection in the mirror, his mandibles a little open and his eyes dark beneath the plate ridges, and Shepard couldn't even begin to imagine what he was thinking.

"Hey," she said, more softly.

He started, as if he'd just heard her, and then said, "Sorry. I—ah, sorry."

She came around behind him (not much space in the small room) and slid her arms around him from behind. Not around his waist as she would have another human—that would have been an overt come-on in a turian, and inappropriate right now, in this changed and charged mood—but higher, around his chest, palms flat over the smooth plates on either side of his keelbone. After a breath that felt like an eternity, he relaxed back into her embrace, and she felt the growing tension ease a little inside her.

Around his shoulder, she could see what he'd painted on her face, and though she'd already guessed it and half-seen it in the reflection of her skylight, still it was startling. Here in the harsh lighting of the bathroom, in the perfectly reflective surface of her mirror, she could see the blue lines—modified a bit because her face was different than a turian's, shorter and flatter, but still very distinctly what they were. Vakarian markings.

"I thought we were just messing around this evening," Shepard said, letting her voice rise a little at the end to make it a question.

"Yeah," Garrus said. "So did I." He hesitated; she could feel in the vibrations of his chest that he started to say something, then changed his mind. Finally he said, "I thought I'd put it behind me so much, I thought I was just—I didn't think it would mean much of anything to me anymore."

"But it did."

A rumble of assent. Shepard hesitated. She wanted to ask, wanted—wanted to know what he meant, wanted to press. But even more she didn't want to back him into a corner. Depths here, depths she wasn't sure she wanted to plumb when he was already on edge.

After a moment he raised his hands, still damp from when he'd washed them, and covered hers, thumbs stroking their backs before he peeled her loose and turned around to face her. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't think—but I shouldn't have, um. Sorry. That wasn't fair to you."

"You didn't run far," she said, and he looked startled, and then chuckled. "It's okay," she said. "Really. It's fine." It wasn't, quite, but the way he relaxed, loosened his mandibles and his brow-plates into a hopeful smile, she knew she'd done the right thing by not pushing. Not now, not right now. "C'mon, let's go to bed."

Before she followed him back out into the Loft, she wiped the paint off her face with the still-damp washcloth.

In bed, he curled himself on one side, his body a warm curve with hers tucked inside it. His arms were tight around her, and she read a desperation in the tension of his muscles, and knew from that wordless grip that his reaction to the sight of the paint on her face wasn't a rejection of _her_. The tension in her gut eased a little more. Garrus had always been more a do-er than a talker, and if his body language accepted her, then he accepted her, stumbling notwithstanding.

But there was something going on there, something—something going on with him, something that upset him. Now, here, with his tight breath slowly easing and washing over her hair and his thumb drawing careful circles on her stomach, it wasn't the time to push. 

But she hadn't gotten where she was by avoiding the hard questions, and she decided there in the dark with him that she was going to figure this out eventually. Two nights in a row now, they'd stumbled on something. Neither time had Garrus wanted to talk about it, but she was going to figure it out. For both their sakes.

* * *

The next day, in between some lengthy and tiresome probing for palladium, talking with the navigator to determine the fastest safe course to a colony that had reported rogue geth, and making the usual daily rounds, Shepard scratched out an hour for some good Extranet searching. First search: Vakarian.

She felt a little odd doing it. Had she searched on Vakarian when she'd first met him, or even at any point before they'd become… whatever it was that they were now, it would have felt perfectly normal. She was sure that most of the crew had searched the hell out of "Shepard," just because people liked to know who they were working with. But now, it felt strange to search his name rather than ask him. Only he had a habit of freaking out when the topic came up.

_It's not like you're hacking his omnitool_ , she told herself. _No real ethical issues. It's just a public Extranet search._

Most of the reports were very boring. There were the usual news accounts of Garrus' role in the Battle of the Citadel, and a smattering of other, similar recent news accounts. She stripped out recent news accounts, searching down another layer, and that was when she started to get information, not on Garrus, but on his father. Thernos Vakarian.

Whatever else one might have said about him, at least it was fair to say that Thernos Vakarian's reputation as an exemplary C-Sec officer wasn't exaggerated. While he'd been on the job, both crime and corruption in his ward had been at an all-time low. He'd solved complex and difficult cases and run to ground dangerous enemies aplenty, including—most famously—a crazy salarian S.O.B. who'd wired half of Linekta Ward with explosives and threatened to blow it clear off if his demands weren't met. No wonder he was still something of a legend. He'd returned to Palaven to marry and have children, and had alternated shifts on the Citadel with months at home with his family before finally retiring; militarily-minded as they were, turians also put a high value on family life, and were willing to accommodate it.

The first bio that included a picture of Thernos was a shock. Not even so much for the feature similarities, although they were there (Garrus took after his father in features and build, though not coloring), but because of the tattoo. It was identical to Garrus'; of course it was, it was stupid to be surprised, but still, seeing those familiar lines, the swoop beneath the eye and the matching thick line along the mandible all in what she had come to recognize as deep blood-blue… seeing it on someone else's face was startling. Unsettling, even.

She could find only one picture of Garrus' mother, who had been in the civil service on Palaven all her life. A researcher. The picture had been taken after she'd married into family Vakarian, and there, again, the same markings. And yes, there, the silver-overlaid-on-fawn color of Garrus' hide, the blue eyes. Thalassa, formerly Thalassa Mykerus, now Thalassa Vakarian.

She searched further. Vakarian was a well-known name, a family with a couple dozen branches, whose members might be stationed all over Hierarchy and Citadel space but who always returned to Palaven to have children. And it was, quite clearly, a very well-respected name too. Her spacer-human sensibilities were shocked by the frankness with which turian information discussed one's relative position in the Hierarchy, and yet of course it made sense. To a turian, there was no shame in being lower or higher, and indeed the human terms 'lower' and 'higher' were poor translations of the turian words for relative status. The shame was in being at the wrong position, or in not knowing your position or that of others—both problems that could be remedied with information. And so it was possible for any given turian to find out, readily, where they stood—as an individual, and in terms of their family, clan, and colony world.

So she could tell from a straightforward search that Vakarian was a reasonably high-status family; that the line that included Garrus' parents was considered one of the more prominent within the family. 

And also: that Vakarian family was considered a reasonably high-status subset of clan Takarus. And that clan Takarus was one of the most prestigious clans on Palaven. And Palaven—the homeworld, after all—was, bar none, the most highly-respected world-of-origin for a turian clan.

In short: to a turian, being of family Vakarian, clan Takarus, and world Palaven was a big freaking deal.

And Garrus had so many issues with his identity, had worked namelessly on Omega, refused to see his family. For a turian, family and clan and homeworld, and, by extension, the associated markings, were something almost religious. 

That niggled at her, and she pushed on. And another search confirmed: no, not _almost_ religious. Literally religious. She'd known that turians believed that when a group of people came together meaningfully, for a purpose, that a spirit came somehow into being. The spirit was something like a zeitgeist and something like a household god, a literal embodiment of the idea of the whole being greater than its parts. A squad or team might have a spirit, or a ship's crew might, if they all worked together in a way that made them greater in aggregate than the individuals were separately. And—of course—a world had a spirit, a clan had a spirit, a family had a spirit.

And he'd left his family behind, and, by extension, the spirits of his family, too. She knew from casual comments that he was something of an agnostic, unsure if he even believed in the existence of his people's spirits, but still. All that training, all that cultural assumption, that was a lot for someone to just leave behind.

So it was no wonder that he'd painted symbols relevant to both his identity and to his people's religion on her face, and then freaked out about it. And that was even before you considered the impact on him of having those markings so badly damaged by a missile to the face.

Shepard shut down her console and gazed into the middle distance, through the rack of model spaceships over her desk. Now she knew, at least, what questions to ask.

It was coming on toward the night cycle when Shepard finally made it back to her quarters. She turned on her console, saw the long list of things that needed her personal attention, rubbed her temples, and then sent a small silent thanks for Miranda, who had undoubtedly cut the list of messages down from three hundred to the twenty that still needed her personal touch.

Then she ignored them all in favor of staring through the screen, trying to figure out how to invite Garrus up to her quarters without being scary. It was barely possibly that turians didn't find a "We need to talk" intimidating… but she was willing to lay bets that _that_ particular phrase, spoken (or typed) by one's significant other, was scary to every species. (Except possibly salarians, who seemed to have avoided the whole mess of romance. Maybe that was why salarians had such a leg up on scientific progress: fewer stupid distractions.)

She was weighing the merits of a casual, "Hey, busy tonight?" when the door chimed and then whisked open, and there was Garrus, with a bottle of wine, looking a little sheepish.

"I, um," he began, and then he hesitated and said, "…wanted to let you know that I'm sorry I was weird yesterday. So." He wiggled the bottle. "Apology?"

"You didn't have to."

"Yeah, I know," he said, and his mandibles flared into a smile. "But I wanted to."

It was weirdly like that first time, and yet not really at all. Once again he'd found a bottle of something that (like the body paint) had been carefully filtered (at probably considerable expense) to remove problematic proteins. Once again, the wine actually didn't taste that good, but the objective quality was made up for by the fact that they could both drink the same thing, a strange and unexpected luxury. But that first time he'd sat on her couch carefully, as if afraid that a wrong move would send her fleeing, or as if he might accidentally flay her with a touch. He seemed a lot less posed for flight this time, but there was still a tension in the room. An anxiety that was more intimate but no less powerful for that.

Out of nowhere, Garrus said, "Part of it is, I still hate the—the way my face looks. The scars. I know that's stupid."

Shepard put down her glass and scooted closer, so that she could lean her shoulder into his side: not quite an embrace, still intimate. "It's not stupid."

Garrus huffed. "It's not like I'm… what's the phrase? On the stalk?"

Brief, hilarious image of Garrus atop a blade of wheat. She repressed a laugh. "On the prowl, I think."

"Mm." He rolled his eyes toward her. "The point still stands."

"I don't know. I don't think you have to be picking up women to care that your face is different than it was your whole life. I don't really like my scars, either."

"Yours are almost gone."

"A lot of them are. I have new ones, though."

Garrus grunted, acknowledging the truth of that. Shepard slid closer, ran a hand up his right mandible, felt its surface rough and pitted. The acid and dye of turian markings made a faint raised pattern, but over that lay deep scars from the trauma of explosion, the splatter-patterned plasma burn, the pockmarks where Chakwas had picked out shrapnel. And higher up, the bandage, covering where there had been more damage. She'd seen it off, in the shower: the cold glitter of his cybernetics, the raw blue of exposed flesh where his plates had been blown off entirely. 

He didn't like even _her_ to see under his bandage.

But she touched him, gently, along his mandible, and when he turned his face into her hand and hummed she said, "If it makes a difference, I think you are… devastatingly attractive." She made her voice light enough that it was clear she was being a little silly, but serious enough for him to hear the truth.

He smiled, turned his face further into her hand so he could nip gently at her wrist. "I'm glad. Still—"

"It's not the same, I know. It's hard to see yourself in the mirror and know you'll be different forever."

"Yeah," he said. "That." He leaned forward for his glass and took a long sip. Blessed ethanol, intoxicant for so _many_ species.

She lay her cheek against his shoulder, felt the edges of his plates even through his shirt. After a minute, she said, "That's not all it was, though. Was it?"

"No." Garrus exhaled again, and she could feel a little more tension draining out of him. A little, a little, a little at a time….

"I thought we were taking things light, yesterday."

"Yeah," Garrus said, "So did I." Another sigh. "I was just—I was just… goofing around, I guess. Because I didn't think it mattered to me anymore. My family, I mean." He tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling. "I'm not actually disowned, but that's mostly because I don't talk to my father anymore at all, and so he hasn't felt obliged to push the issue. My sister hardly ever speaks to me, and I know Dad has his hopes of the family line pinned entirely on her. My mother is the last real tie I have, and she's… probably not going to live long. I thought I didn't _care_ about Vakarian anymore, or, or any of that. So I didn't think—I didn't think it would _mean_ anything, if I just saw what you would look like with my markings. I thought it would be like… like when you wrote N7 on my shoulder. Not… meaningless, but not…."

He trailed off again, but it didn't matter; Shepard knew what he meant. "If you were a 'good' turian, what would it mean, for me to, ah…?" She had a pretty good idea, but she wanted to hear him say it. Or, more, wanted to hear _how_ he'd say it.

"Wear my marks?" Garrus' mandible tipped into a wry smile and he leaned forward, studying his hands. "Between turians, that's what happens when people merge families. The person who belongs to the clan that's lower in the Hierarchy joins the clan of the person whose clan is higher-status. It can happen through adoption, but usually it's, ah…."

After a long, wobbling moment, Shepard took pity. "Marriage," she said.

"That'd be the closest translation," Garrus agreed. "And, ah… Vakarian is a fairly high-status family, but Takarus is a _very_ high-status clan, so I always knew that it was likely statistically that if I—well, let me put it this way: odds were good that it wouldn't be me who would be changing markings." His talon-tips drummed nervously on the tabletop, rattle-rattle-rattle, until Shepard reached out to put her hand on his and stilled it. 

"Garrus," she said, "I'm hardly going to be offended because you accidentally sort of proposed and then freaked out about it. I mean, we've only been involved a few weeks. It'd be kind of premature even if we were both the same species and we weren't trying to stop the Reapers from taking over the galaxy. It'd be early if everything was _easy_. Which it isn't."

Garrus nodded, but there was still tension in his neck. He lifted his free hand to rub his forehead. "Yeah," he said, and then on a long exhale he added, "…I wish it were that straightforward. I wasn't 'freaked out' about that at all, actually. I was upset because I hadn't realized I cared about being Vakarian anymore. Because if I care, then suddenly all that—" his gesture encompassed everything, his father, his sister, his family, clan, planet "—suddenly matters again, and I don't know how to deal with that." And then, again, that wry sideways tip of a smile. "And I was a little freaked out that I wasn't freaked out by the idea of, um…."

"Me joining your clan?" At his nod, she took both his hands, his six fingers between her ten. It had taken a little work to figure out how to twine their fingers together, but it worked now, skin sliding easily against hide. "I love you, but everything's crazy, so I haven't—I'm not even _starting_ to think about long-term." Garrus opened his mouth, but she interrupted him: "Aah, let me finish. So I don't want to make you any promises or even imply any promises when either or both of us could be dead tomorrow. Or I might have to do something that you find reprehensible." He made a face, like he wanted to protest, but he refrained, and she was glad. She still remembered Horizon all too painfully. She continued, "And I certainly won't hold you responsible if we do survive this and you change your mind in a year, because months and months of stress make people kind of nuts." And then she smiled, and squeezed his hand, rubbed her thumb across the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. "But, if it helps, the idea didn't freak _me_ out, either."

Garrus' mouth drew shut, mandibles tight, and then, after a moment, he nodded. Then he said, "That's the first you've said that."

"Hmm?"

"That you, um. That you love me."

"Oh. Really?" That didn't seem right, but, thinking back over the prior weeks, Shepard couldn't think of any counterexamples. Garrus blinked at her, suddenly owlish. She reached up to rub along his mandible, along the dark blue line. Garrus, of Vakarian, of Takarus, of Palaven.

"Anyway," she continued, fingertips soft on the underside of his mandible, "it's true."

His sudden smile shifted her fingers. "Yeah," he said. "Me too."

* * *

It was a full week before either of them laid a finger on the paint again, but by the time Garrus did, Shepard was relaxed enough on the subject not to be too worried. Not even when he reached for the blue paint and asked, in his low polyphonic voice, for her to close her eyes.

She was exquisitely aware of his touch: the suedeline gentleness of the pads of his fingers, the cool dangerous brush of the tips of his talons. Dark blue on the bridge her nose, sweeping beneath the curve of her eye and across her cheek, lower along her jaw. She'd seen many turians in her career, but the pattern of Vakarian were among the boldest and simplest. 

The cooling sensation of damp paint made her shiver. The sheer physical contact made her shiver.

After a little while Garrus leaned back to inspect his handiwork, but this time his didn't run. She saw his mandibles quiver with some strong feeling, but he didn't run. She caught his hand and licked his fingers clean, carefully, then let them go so he could cup her face in his hands and just look at her for a long, breath-stealing moment.

He leaned in and rested his forehead against hers, eyes closed. In that position his marks lay almost perfectly parallel to hers. Then he dropped his head to nip at her shoulder, and she gave his chest a push, stalling him.

He gave her a quizzical look. She reached for the paint.

It took a lot less time for her to make her mark on him. Across his chest, from one chestplate to the other and spanning over his prominent breastbone, she wrote "NORMANDY" in stark black. It gleamed against the silver-tinted fawn of his plates.

He studied it, clearly able to recognize the human symbols even without the visual-translation abilities of his visor. Then he caught her paint-stained hands and said, lightly, "Appropriate. But it really wasn't necessary."

"Hm?"

"You've had me marked ever since you let me come with you to chase Saren," he said, and flared his mandibles in a smile, and rubbed his thumb over the inside of her wrist.

She smiled in return, leaned in, and kissed his mandible, his chin, his mouth.

She'd laughed the first time Mordin had talked about 'positions comfortable for both species,' but it had turned out to be no joke: it was painful for Garrus to lie on his back for very long, and while they _could_ have sex on all fours, it took some maneuvering because if they weren't careful he'd bruise her (in an uncomfortable way, not a sexy way) with the spurs on his hips. But there were positions that worked well, and of them, a particular favorite was….

Garrus' back against the headboard of the bed, his knees drawn up to accommodate the blunt spurs of his calves. Shepard astride his hips, guided down against his sensitive waist by the angle of his thighs. And it was all the better like this because the position, face-to-face, made it possible to indulge both the brow-nuzzling romantic gesture of his culture and the mouth-to-mouth one of hers. And the delightful mutual nipping and biting of jaw and throat for both of them….

She rocked against him, felt the ridges of his cock rub from perineum to clit, leaned in to lick at his chestplates—tasted the familiar metal-leather of his skin, overlaid with the sweet of the paint. He laughed, gasped, said, "Nor-andy?"

"Close enough," she said, and rose up a little on her knees to take him in, slide down on him.

He cupped her face in his hands, six strong fingers warm against her skin and his hands tipping her forehead forward against his. She’d come to appreciate this position: forehead-to-forehead she could see his eyes, their breaths mingled, every expression of his face was open to her. She felt the faint prick of the tips of his talons on her cheekbones, and the control that kept him from doing real damage, and the combination chased a shiver down her spine. Garrus' eyes were intent on her, meeting her eyes and then sliding deliberately over her face, over the blue that stood out starkly against her skin.

A deep thrum of arousal began low in Garrus' body; she could feel it vibrating through her body. He nudged her forehead with his own and then lowered his head further to lick at her throat, the upper curve of her breasts, and finally her nipples, which hardened under the rasp of his serpentine tongue and sent little static-shock bolts of pleasure straight down to her groin. She ran her hands along the inside of his cowl and then up his neck to dig her fingers into his neck. He groaned low and thrust up into her, the slow delicious transmutation of tenderness into need, as powerful in its own way as the raw urgent fucking after a battle.

She spread her thighs wider and leaned into him, felt the thrumming of his purr through his hands into her skin, through his chest into hers, through his cock deep into her—something like the buzz of a vibrator and yet warm, alive, so much better. She rolled her head back on her neck and moaned, and left off thinking for a while.

Warm, smooth plates against the skin of her thighs as she rocked on him. Delicious friction of his ridges inside her, rubbing just right—just—there, there, there—

Garrus’ hands on her hips, steadying her when her movements grew frantic enough that she needed help keeping the rhythm. Strong fingers, his thumb stroking her hipbone and then gliding farther in to press against her, circle and rub her clit, smooth steady pressure that—

—she realized she was talking. "Oh god, oh god, there, there, there, Garrus—"

—and even so her orgasm caught her by surprise, froze her with its intensity, her mouth open on a moan and her spine bent, her body rigid and trembling in that first long timeless moment before the ripples hit her and rocked her and spent her. He growled, the sound and vibration merging with her aftershocks into one long blissful exhale of pleasure, and rocked hard and deep up into her a few more times before he too came.

Afterward he wrapped his arms around her waist and flopped back onto the bed, and she went with him, bounced off his chest, laughed. He rolled to his side and, in a delicate and leisurely manner that made her shiver all over, licked the paint off her face. Then he said, "Love you."

He sounded a little shy about it, still. Well: so did she. "You too."

Some amount of time passed; she couldn’t say how long. In the warm, calm cocoon of her bed, her quarters, she wasn’t as aware of the constant tick of time as she was elsewhere. Then she said, "Do you want to see your parents?"

"Yeah," Garrus said, more quickly than she’d expected. Then he rubbed his hand over his eyes. "But not now."

"It might be a good idea, before—" Before the final battle. She didn’t have to say it; he understood.

"I don’t think so. If it goes badly, well, I don’t need the distraction." He gave her a lopsided, slightly fuzzy grin. "And if it goes well, I don’t need more reasons to be afraid of biting it."

"Officer Vakarian," she said, very seriously. "I order you not to die. And then after that we’ll go see your family." And then she kissed his nose.

"Yes, ma'am."

* * *

In the shuttle, Garrus shifted position about ten times a minute: now propping his elbows on the back of his seat, now leaning forward, now looking out the small window, now looking at the ceiling. Shepard watched with mingled fondness and alarm.

Finally she leaned forward, reached out, and caught his wrist in her hand. "Garrus. It's going to be okay."

His mandibles flapped out in disbelieving amusement. "How do you know?"

"You stared down a reaper last week," Shepard said, drily. "I know your father is known for being a terror, but I don't think it's possible for him to be _that_ bad."

"Ha ha," Garrus said.

"Besides. You're a hero, an icon. You'll be remembered for hundreds of years—maybe longer, if Liara knows her job. I happen to know that means a lot for turians."

"Hmmh," Garrus said, and then, sourly, "You haven't met my father."

"No. But I will, soon," she said, and squeezed his hand. He met her eyes, and squeezed back.

On the shuttle platform, they scanned the crowd together. "My sister is—" Garrus began, but Shepard cut him off.

"There," she said. She'd known her immediately. Not because of the stark blue of Vakarian markings—although those were good confirmation—but because of Solona's posture. She stood exactly like her brother: slim, upright, and yet with her hip and shoulder cocked lazily to one side. Shepard repressed a smile. Garrus and his sister were as alike as peas in a pod—the only differences the ones dictated by differing gender and sex.

Garrus looked impressed, and pleased as well. "I didn't know you'd gotten that good at distinguishing turians."

"Learned from the best," she said. Then Solona's calm sweep of the room centered in on them, and she slid out of her slouch and started their way. Shepard caught Garrus' hand and squeezed it. "Let's go."

**Author's Note:**

> The title, of course, is from "[somewhere i have never travelled](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/somewhere-i-have-never-travelledgladly-beyond)" by e.e. cummings, which is an old favorite of mine.


End file.
